"Boss" Tweed : the story of a grim generation / by Denis Tilden Lynch.

206 "Boss" Tweed
Every one ate heartily. No one enjoyed the food more than
Tweed. There were many courses. One was soft shell crabs.
These delicacies, which are not to be found in New York waters
until midsummer, were gathered for the occasion in a Virginian bay. Tweed had several helpings of crabs. In fact
he ate little else. Rare wines were served with every course.
Lawgivers, lawmakers, and lawbreakers toasted one another,
and all toasted Tweed. Tweed raised his glass to every toast.
It was always a glass of champagne. Those who sat next to
Tweed observed that he scarcely sipped the wine when he
placed the glass to his lips. Yet each time he made a pretense of swallowing. But there was still a little wine in the
glass when the dinner was over. A stranger entering the
banquet hall when the talk was loud and the laughter louder,
seeing Tweed's ruddy countenance, and hearing his talk and
laughter, which were in keeping with the rest, would have assumed that he, too, was in his cups.
Ten days after this dinner, there was held, in this same
hotel, a meeting of the members of the Tammany Society. It
was a meeting a little out of the ordinary. The Tammany
Society during its first hundred years or so, exercised almost
as much power-sometimes more-than the purely political
side of the organization. On more occasions than one the
Tammany Society, through its Council of Sachems, had decided which of two warring factions was the regular organization of the county. Men living in all parts of the country,
who never cast a vote in New York, were members of the
Society. On this day there were men from the West in
attendance at the meeting. They had been summoned by
urgent appeal to aid in preventing former Mayor Wood from
capturing the Tammany Society, and in turn, possibly, the
entire organization. Wood planned to do this by electing
his own Council of Sachems. But in this he was outwitted,
and the anti-Wood ticket, headed by Isaac V. Fowler, a leader
of society, a lawyer, and Postmaster of the city, was elected.
Fowler at this time was generally regarded as an honest man.
He was at heart a thief. But he was no whit worse than
his brother, John Walker Fowler, who, as clerk to Surrogate